David Zindell - The Lightstone

And then, miraculously, it was over. The agony of the men I had killed came flooding into me as I stared at the bodies of the nine teen dead knights and fought to keep myself from falling down and I joining them.

'Look!' Ymiru called out. 'One of them is getting away!'

Indeed, one of the knights, in the heat of the battle, had turned his horse around and was now galloping straight toward the mouth of the canyon.

Atara came out from behind her tree then to get a better angle upon him. She pulled back the string of her great bow, sighting one of her diamond-tipped arrows on the red dragon of the surcoat covering the knight's back. It was a long shot that she trembled to make – made even longer with every second that she hesitated loosing her arrow.

'Shoot, damn it!' Kane shouted. 'Shoot now, I say, or all is lost!'

Atara finally let fly the arrow. It split the air in an invisible whining and drove straight through the knight's surcoat and armor, burying itself in his back. He remained in his saddle for only a few strides of his bounding horse before plunging off to crash against the rocky ground.

During the next few minutes, Kane went about the mountain's slope with his sword making sure that none of Morjin's men remained alive. And then Master Juwain noticed that some of the blood dripping from his white hair was not the enemy's but his own. It seemed that one of the knights had sliced off his ear.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram said.

None of us had ever seen Kane wounded. But as always, he made no complaint not even when Maram set a brand afire and Master Juwain used it to cauterize the bloody hole at the side of his head.

'So, that was close,' he said as Master Juwain fixed a bandage over what remained of his ear. 'The closest yet, eh?'

All the rest of us were untouched. But I was still shaking from the deaths I had meted out and Maram stood staring at his bloody sword not quite daring to believe that he had used it to kill two armored knights.

'You did well, Maram,' Kane said to him. 'Very well. Now let's get back to work before anyone else comes, eh?'

Maram cleaned his sword and sheathed it. He took out his red crystal. But he was not quite ready to use it. He walked off a way, up a slight rise, and stood staring down at the carnage that we had made.

After a while, after the shooting pains were gone from my chest and I could breathe again, I went over to him and said, 'You did do well, you know. You saved my life.'

'I did, didn't I?' he said as he smiled brightly. And then the horror returned to his face as his eyes fell upon the bodies of the slain. 'Kane was right, I think. That was the closest yet.'

He turned to look at the dark hole that he had burned in Skartaru's dark north face.

Then he said, 'And yet I think that perhaps worse awaits us inside there.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

'Perhaps it's the end of the road, for all of us.'

'Don't worry,' I said to him, grasping his hand. 'I won't let you die.'

'Ah, death,' he said, smiling sadly. 'I must die someday. It seems strange, but I know it's true.'

I squeezed his hand harder, trying not to think of the lines of the poem that had haunted me ever since I had killed Raldu in the forest beneath my father's castle.

'And when I do die, Val,' he said, 'if I could choose, I'd rather have it come fighting beside you.'

'Maram, listen to me, you mustn't speak -'

'No, I must speak of this, now, because I might not have another chance,' he told me. Then he looked straight into my eyes. 'Ever since we set out from Mesh, you've shown me a realm I never dreamed. I… I was born the prince of a great kingdom.

But it's you who have made me noble.'

He clasped me to him then and hugged me as hard as he could. And then, as he dried his eyes and I did mine, he took a step back and said, 'Now let's finish this nasty business and get out of here, if we can.'

There was a man whom Maram wished to be. This man now gathered up all of his bravura and stood up straight and tall. Then he gripped his red crystal and marched up to Skartaru's darkening face without hesitation.

As before, with Kane's help, he used his firestone to melt the moun tain's black rock.

He stood there, by the base of the Ogre's knee, for most of an hour, working flame against the wall. And at last, in the failling light, he broke through to the hidden cave spoken of in the ancient verse. He stepped aside from this black glowing gash In the earth. And then he smiled proudly to show us that the door to Argattha had been opened.

We spent some time in gathering up the knights' horses and divesting them of their saddles and tack, which we piled up inside the cave. We dragged the dead knights inside, as well; it wouldn't do for the vultures or other animals to find them and so alert another patrol as to what had happened here. After driving off the horses – we hoped they would gallop off into the Wendrush and lose themselves on its endless grasslands – we made our final preparations for entering Argattha. Ymiru unpacked some torches, which he had anticipated needing as far back as Alundil. He also brought out and donned his disguise for making his way through the city. This was a great black, cowled robe that covered him from head to foot. A veil, built into the cowl, hid his face, while he had a huge pair of boots and black gloves to pull on over his furry feet and hands. Thus did the very tall Saryaks of Uskudar dress. Of course, the Saryaks were not quite so tall as the Ymanir, and not nearly so thick.

And their black skins were smooth, like jet. And so Ymiru's disguise would not bear close scrutiny. But this, we hoped, he was unlikely to endure since we had found a way of bypassing Argattha's gates.

'And if we are stopped,' Kane said, holding up one of the knights' medallions, 'these should win our way through.'

At his bidding, we each put on a medallion and hid away our own.

'I hate wearing such,' Liljana said, tapping her finger against her new medallion's gold dragon.

We all did. And we hated even more the idea of stripping the dead of their armor and surcoats and dressing as Morjin's knights, which Maram suggested. Thus we might simply walk into the Dragon's throne room, he said.

'No,' Kane told him, shaking his head, 'thus we might be stopped by Morjin's other knights, wondering why strangers are weanng the livery of their friends. Or asking us the name of our company. The risk here, I deem, is greater than the gain.'

We ail agreed that it was so. And so we would go forth into the city, dressed in our mail and tattered tunics, looking for all the world like vagabonds come to sell our swords, as the knights' captain had suggested.

Our final preparations having been completed, Ymiru heaved a few great boulders over the cut into the mountain that Maram had made so that any passersby might not notice it. And then, standing inside the cave with the bodies of the men we had slain, we lit the torches. Their acrid, oily smoke filled the black cavity around us. Their flickering yellow flames gave enough light to show the cave's curving roof and black walls – and the tunnel at its far end: black and rectangular and opening like a gate into hell.

Holding a torch in one hand and my father's shield in the other, I led the way into it.

Ymiru, whose people had once bored this channel through hard rock, was little help here. He had told us all that he knew about this secret passage: that it wound its way beneath Argattha's first level long since abandoned by Morjin and the city's other denizens. Ymiru thought that the tunnel might give out in the old throne room or onto stairs leading to it. It must give out somewhere on the first level, he said. And from there, we could make our way up to the second level where people lived, and so up to the higher levels until we came to Morjin's new throne room on the seventh and highest level of the city.